“All a woman has to hang on to…:” the middling yet murderous Dolores Claiborne
I recently watched an interview with Kathy Bates in which she singled out Dolores Claiborne (1995) as an “amazing experience”where she’d had the chance to develop a “whole character” — working with a movement coach to map out and inhabit the life of a woman from her forties to her sixties. I was impressed by Bates’ enthusiasm, especially because I’d never heard of the film before. The title struck me as clunky, and when she finished reveling in memories of the good time she’d had making it, I still had no sense of the film’s plot.
So yesterday, when I was at the library, perusing a selection of DVDs that the staff had set out in acknowledgement of Women’s History Month, I smiled when I noticed Dolores among the offerings.
Turns out, the movie is a lot darker than I imagined. For one thing, it’s based on a Stephen King novel — which should tell you all you need to know. In it, Bates’ eponymous heroine is suspected of having murdered first her husband (David Strathairn) and then, eighteen years later, her employer (Judy Parfitt). Those intervening years result in Dolores’ estrangement from her daughter, Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who has moved to New York to become a scowling, pill-popping journalist. When she learns of her mother’s most recent brush with inflicted death, Selena slaps on a beret and pair of sunglasses to catch a ferry from Midtown to Maine, huffing a carton of cigarettes along the way.
She finds her downtrodden mother, a professional maid of twenty years, impulsively cleaning the town hall holding room in which she’s been detained by Detective Mackey (Christopher Plummer) and Constable Stamshaw (John C. Reilly). Their reunion is predictably awkward (“Gosh, honey, you cut your hair!”), just as their car ride back to Dolores’ ramshackle home is the height of slick-urbanite-runaway-doesn’t-know-how-to-reconnect-with-her-bumpkin-mother drama. You almost wonder if screenwriter Tony Gilroy watched My Cousin Vinny (1992) as research before tackling King’s novel.
The first forty minutes of Dolores Claiborne are not encouraging. Director Taylor Hackford doles out plot points like a man feeding mashed peas to an infant: in the opening sequence, we witness a (deliberately misleading) depiction of Dolores’ “murder,” then cut to Selena in her office, where she’s pushing her boss (Eric Bogosian) to assign her a big news story. A colleague walks in, alerts Selena to the charges against her mother, and then we’re tasked with watching a ponderous montage of Selena traveling back to her hometown. It would be so much more evocative if Hackford started the film with Selena arriving on the ferry — but he shirks allusion in favor of procedural storytelling and, eventually, on-the-nose flashbacks.
He leaves nothing to the audience’s imagination, and thus robs his protagonist of the opportunity to earn her audience’s trust. As the story goes on, it becomes clear that Dolores is not a killer so much as she’s a survivor; watching this film in the wake of #MeToo is especially poignant, because it highlights women’s social dependence on abusive or downright diabolical men. It would have been so eloquent if we never actually witnessed what Dolores or her daughter — for the teenage Selena (played by Ellen Muth) suffered at her father’s hands, too — had to endure. Not only would this have left the ball in his audience’s court, challenging us to believe women’s stories without the luxury of “evidence,” it would have prompted Mr. Hackford to convey his characters’ trauma without exploiting it via flashback and reenactment.
Dolores Claiborne isn’t the most sophisticated of flicks. There’s a surprising amount of potty language, literally (“Now you listen to me, Mr. Grand High Poobah of Upper Buttcrack…!”), and its pretenses at regional manners come across as stilted rather than inspired. But its tedium plods along until it becomes a rousing, arresting portrait of one woman’s discouragingly consistent brushes with homicide, and of the empowerment that comes from not quite killing your evil husband.
I’m certainly glad to know that Ms. Bates enjoyed making it.
